vivmedia.net

Welcome to Viv Media’s informal, stream-of-consciousness, random topic-of-the-moment blog.  We’re a small, but fiercely determined web, graphics and software development company. We’ve been in the software business in one shape or form or another for nearly twenty-five years.  Web development and design ventures are somewhat newer, and started as something “on the side” for a number of years, with serious commercial activity beginning in 2006.

Our projects are generally private deals, hand-selected, and we’re not advertising our services commercially here (or anywhere else) at this stage.  However, in the course of our efforts, especially over the last two years, it has become abundantly apparent that the web itself, besides becoming our chosen medium of expression — and livlihood – has also become an indispensible resource in doing our jobs. Through the efforts of others before us who decided to contribute bits and pieces of their expertise to the wordlwide community, often via simple forums just such as this, countless hours have been saved by finding a needed technique…a solution…an idea…put up by someone else, just like us, who scratched their heads looking for an answer to a similar problem, or the same one…and then found it…and went one step further and decided to share. Even a mere nudge in the right direction that can come from someone else’s experience is sometimes of inestimable value.

Sure, you can…and should…buy books.  But frequently the most up-to-date answers to problems we face, in HTML/DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Cross-Browser issues, SQL, XML, Scripting languages like PHP, PERL, Python, Graphics editing and design and more, are found not in any book, but right here on the web, contributed by someone else, just like us, who in the course of doing their own work also decided to give something back to this community.

And so this blog is something of the answer to two nagging problems:

(1) What should a small web company doing private projects and joint ventures put on its own web site?

(2) What is a good way to gather together the growing collection of tips and tricks that really work; nasty “gotcha’s” that everybody seems to forget at least once; and other sanity-preserving pieces of collective knowledge and information; and at the same time give thanks and credit to those who have come along before us and been willing to share?

The answer presented itself in the form of this blog. As our own way of saying “Thank you,” and also trying to give something back to the online community that has certainly helped us along, rather than merely scribbling newly-found tips, tricks and workarounds into a journal, or typing them into another local file that we may or may not even remember to look at ourselves three months from now, we’re going to start mentioning them here.   When we find something that works, and works well, we’ll mention it here and give credit where credit is due.

So if you’ve stumbled across us, and find anything useful here, do take a moment to let us know.  And if you have anything you’d like to share, by all means, let us have your comments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.